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hard to do l believe we will get there but it'11 take time

other types of animals such as frogs, which go together wth molluscs m terms of individual neuronal acli\nty Sometimes. scientists also study cats and dogs Which ammal you choose to study depends on what you want to study If you want to study the bram itselt you study mice, rats and monkeys But if you study the physi-ology of the body, then you can work with dogs, pigs and other mammals larger than mice

We hear a lot that only a certain percentage of our brain is used and the rest is not. So, what does it mean exactly?

People say we use 10% of our bram, but there is nothmg that really sug-gests this is true You can use an MW scanner, which allows you to see which parts of the bram are active by showmg you how much oxygen is supplied to that pan of the bram So if you place a patient there while they are sleeping or relaxmg. and you took at the picture of the bram, ev-ery single part of the bram is domg something

When we want to know which part of the brain is workmg morę or harder, we always have to compare our re-sults to the base linę, which is when the subject is doing nothing

Then you ask the person to perform a task such as reading a text and you can identify the language area of the bram However, all the bram is workmg at the moment because we know of very few areas in the bram where a damage to that area has no impact on the patient

How far away is rasearch for brain regeneration?

People are workmg on it, I be!ieve it can be done soon When people work on brain regeneration, they don't just work with humans Wnat they do is get samples of neurons from rats or mice and put them in a petri dish and give them nutnents to let them grow and divide

After that, they break them at certain points and try to use Chemicals or other techmques borrowed from bio-medical engmeenng to fix the broken points They can see the results m the dish 8ut how to go from the dish to the actual speamen is something

kinds of celi* in the brain?

Yes, neurons also have support cells that we cali glia, of which we know 3 types So the brain functions because our neurons are able to conduct the impulses, send and transform infor-mation.

But the gtial cells keep the neurons alive and functionmg They are the cells that help the nutnents get to the neurons from the blood vessels And to keep neurons together. we need glia, which iranslaies to 'glue' from Greek In other words, glial cells are mvo!ved in mamtenance, or house keeping. functions

What kind of research do you do?

Thafs my favounte question I study the anatomy of the panetal lobe, which is one part of the bram Morę specificatly, I study the sula, which are the folds on the brain surface

People sometimes think they are just randomly arranged, while others think they aren’t random but are just very hard to study What we know so far in terms of iheir anatomy dates back to the begmning of the 20th century

What I do is try to go a bit further using MRl seans of many patients lii study their sulci and try to subdivide the regions m terms of the patlems orirregulanties that are formed in the human bram

The reason for studymg that is that we believe the sula to be like land-marks If you think of the human bram like the Earth. next to nvers, we usual-ly havc towns In the case of the bram, nexi to the sulci (the nvers), we have different functional areas

The question Tm trymg to answer is If I subdwide the sulci into basie units, will I also be able to fmd basie functional units very close^> One applica-tion of this research is for surgeons who are domg surgery and have a digital image of the brain This would help them to find out how much of a lumor they can remove safely without affecting the patienfs capabilities ■